Let Them Eat (Wedding) Cake

Greg White fell in love with a Canadian man. And today, he got good news — “the kind of news where you recklessly go out to breakfast and eat carbs.”

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Playboy ruined reading for me. Now I only scan pages and look for pictures. It also kept trying to hammer in my head that I needed to love a woman. No matter how hard I wanted to walk down the aisle and marry a girl, it didn’t feel right. The devilish detail that I wanted to walk down the aisle should have clued in the voices in my head that I didn’t want to marry Barbie — I wanted Ken.

Just as I can’t help what I fall in love with, I didn’t let an international border determine who my partner would be. I met a Canadian. Except for the pretty money and chilly skin they seem so much like Americans. Sure they don’t have many guns, but if one does get shot they offer nationalized health care.

U.S. immigration thinks my boyfriend enters America too often, and fears he’s taking a job. He gets hauled back into a custom’s prison and interrogated for hours asking him the same questions over and over, mostly if he has a U.S. job or contract. They separate us, or else I’d gladly go in and tell them to relax — he doesn’t want a job in Canada, much less here.

They refused him entry once and now he attempts to enter maybe twice a year. The U.S. immigration officers are mean and rude to him, and to me. They have told each of us separately a variation of the same chilling phrase: We don’t want you/him here.

I can hop freely border to border, but we don’t want to be in Canada – it’s fucking cold. I live in California where it’s magically getting warmer year after year. Once I learned that Canadians are taxed on services, such as tax preparation or haircuts, I never bitched about Jerry Brown’s taxes again. Sure Montreal is foreign and exotic and the strippers can stir your drinks with their penises but I don’t speak enough French to seek the resulting, albeit free, necessary medical attention.

If I had served in Viet Nam during my time in the Marines instead of Palm Springs, I might have met and brought home a bride. I mean, if I wanted a bride I could have brought one home and she would have rightfully gained a green card eventually. I’d have grown resentful of the fact that she was a woman, our marriage would’ve resulted in divorce and I’d rarely get to see my awfully cute kids. But I couldn’t have dragged home a man, even in drag.

So until today, DOMA had me bummed out. I was free to marry whomever I wanted in certain states, but it didn’t help with immigration because it wasn’t Federal. As various states passed marriage equality laws, my friends all advised me to marry my boyfriend. But DOMA had to be torn down like an obscene poster in a church to allow us to have rights throughout the land.

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I woke up this morning prepared to be let down by a group of intellectuals in long, ill fitting gowns who don’t know me. Nine people who haven’t felt the awful rejection of a whole country. My boyfriend is nicer than any of them, and it still pains me to know that our border guards have been mean and rude to him and can continue to do so.

We were this close to outsourcing my citizenship and have looked at living in other countries – but I want to keep supporting the U.S economy. I know my way around all the malls.

Instead I got good news. The kind of great news where you go out for breakfast and recklessly eat carbs.

The road is still long and crooked; we have to get a fiancé visa and hire a lawyer. But we have the stamp of approval from those nine caffeinated judges who saw that marriage is marriage. Perhaps they counted the number of my own parent’s “conventional” weddings and realized that no one really stands a chance at staying together so what the hell. Their ruling might read: The gays can do wonders transitioning a run-down neighborhood, and we’ve all seen that cutie Nate Berkus remodel the bejeezus out of a town house, so let ‘em have a go at marriage!

If we do marry, it will of course be a lavishly tasteful seaside ceremony catered by Martha Stewart, Cher will sing, and it will be witnessed by millions via instagram and retweeted by actual doves – but I’ll be most excited to witness my better half waltz through the US/Canadian border, waving his green card like our inferior money.

By the way, when that day comes, I am registered everywhere. Payback is a one-size-fits-all bitch in every color.

About Greg White

Greg Cope White is an author, blogger, television writer and host, cook, world traveler, and inveterate bon vivant. He's also a former sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, with a book out about that time, The Pink Marine.

His Marine Corps memoir is optioned for a TV series. Meanwhile, he’s a bi-coastal, polo-playing, sixth-generation Texan with a voracious appetite for life. He has a long history in film and television. He just shot a pilot for Food Network. You can currently watch him on Cooking Channel’s show Unique Sweets.